Aperture has frozen and refuses to re-open

I am working on a MacMini, using Aperture 3.5.1. I upgraded to OS10.9.2 when it was released a few weeks ago.

I have had no problems untila couple of hours ago this afternoon. In the midst of a simple editing session (I was deleting some images and creating some new albums) the application went haywire. Several images seemed not to appear and then I realized that the application had frozen. I forced Quit but then Aperture refused to open the Aperture library. I tried this twice more and did a restart of the computer — but nothing changed. I then turned off the computer, waited 20 minutes, restarted to holding down PR Alt Cmd — zapping the whatever — and no change.

I then attempted to copy the Aperture library to a back-up USB flash drive and got the message: "The Finder can't complete the operation because some data on 'Aperture Library.aplibrary' can't be read or written. (Error Code -36)"

I then attempted to Backup the stuff on both kard disks using Time Machine, which I do about once a fortnight. It's been preparing the back-up for quite some time without seeming to do anything.

Meanwhile, unless I'm gravely mistaken, the size of the Aperture Library seems to have grown by about 20GB without me apparently having sone anything in this regard!!!

I have a funny feeling that it's less a problem with Aperture and more an issue of OS 10.9.2.

H E L P !!!!!!!